How keep your Instagram Uniform

There’s a lot of topics in google or even people saying how one should best use Instagram to promote their business. Whilst all of these are helpful, the overload in information can’t make decisions easier in branding your business, especially for start-up business owners.

So, should you follow the rules or break them?

I recently wrote a blog about the quality of the content or the quality of the creative coming you produce. I think some people get really concerned about everything having to be perfect and polished, which I don’t believe is always the case. I think great content makes a big difference, but if you’re running a startup business, you don’t need your content to be in the same caliber as the big players in your industry. I know—because I don’t. Getting your content to 80% is more than enough and is good enough – if you remain CONSISTENT.

A lot of people nowadays realise the potential of advertising on Facebook for their online businesses. A popular practice for businesses – especially with after the algorithm changes- is creating Facebook Ads. It is important that your business produces a Facebook Ad that attracts your audiences attention while creating desire for your product, turning your audience into potential customers.

Here are my tips for creating a perfect Facebook Ad

Know your audience

You need to laser focus on who your target audience is. It is important to understand your audience and what appeals to them and what is relevant to them in relation to your business. This is what you need to consider before doing any creative or copy for your Facebook Ad.

Knowing your audience gives you more information on the style of imagery, video or copy that your audience would relate to and the style that would capture their attention which would then create desire for your product.

Same with traditional advertising, you only have a very small window of opportunity for your ad to be seen by your audience. On average your ad has only 1.2 seconds to capture the attention of your audience when they’re scrolling through their feeds. This is why it is beneficial to have a targeted market. It is important to note that your ad should have the ability to stop the audience and get them to act or enough for them to notice several times for them to make the decision to act.

Identify your objective

I’ve talked about identifying your objectives in my book, “I just want it to work”. For me, everything that you do should begin with setting the right objective and attaching these objectives to the right strategy. Create objectives that are relevant to your campaign and to your target audience.

The beauty about Facebook is that it provides you with insights into the type of objective that you would set.

For instance, say your objective would be “I need to get traffic to my website or to a landing page”. On Facebook you would select ‘Traffic’ as your objective for that post which aims to drive engagement and clicks through to your website. When you set this objective for your Ad, the goal is to entice or intrigue people to click through to your website.

Create the Ad Objective

What do you want your ad to look like? So, Facebook has a number of different strategies that are available. The copy, imagery or the videos play a vital role when creating the ad’s objective. In my experience, we find that video ads tend to work best in capturing people’s attention quicker than just a static image. If you’re using static images, one of the things that we tend to recommend with advertising is what they call split testing. Split test or split testing is when you use a variety of images, video or copy in different combinations to test what combination works best, who gets the most engagement or action from your target audience. For instance, for our blog posts we use captivating landscape imagery which catches peoples attention when scrolling. Once they have stopped to look at the image, they then read the copy and get intrigued and click through to the blog. This strategy is important to note, as humans are wired visually.

In my agency, what we do when we build campaigns is to use different combinations. For example, we might use 5 different images, we might even use 5 different pieces of copy, or 5 different images, we can use a video with 5 different pieces of copy. You see, when creating ads, our combinations gives us 20, 30 or even 40 ads just for one campaign.

And then we launch those ads and then we optimise those ads based on what the audiences are doing.

On our reports, we might find that the people are clicking more on the video rather than clicking on the static images. Or they may be leaning towards one combination of static images more than they’re leaning towards another combination of static images.

Ultimately, there’s a variety of strategies that you can employ to optimise that and get the best performance for your Facebook ads campaign.

Just to recap, creating a perfect Facebook Ad is all about keeping it really simple, think about your audience. Think about what appeals to them, consider the aim or goal that you want to achieve with your post and then match that with the right objective within the advertising manager on Facebook. Once you understand this, you can begin split testing different styles of posts to find out which work best and get the most engagement from your target audience.

Imagine and think about the popular real estate agents that you know. Do you remember about the specific detail that the agent was known for? Every successful realtor in the market have their own brand.

Personal brands, just like my Kevin Spiteri brand other influencers out there, is the aim of every aspiring agent so that can people relate to them because having a brand differentiates you in the market.

Their personal brand helps you remember them and eventually that’s what draws you in to do business with them. People do business with people. This is not a business to consumer transaction, this is not a business to business transaction. You’ll then realize, it’s one person doing business with another person and that’s how we do business. It’s about the brand and the personality.

You’ll see a lot of real estate agents go the extra mile in building their brand by putting themselves on billboards which can be seen on buses and bus stops. They’re trying to achieve that above the line branding that major brand awareness creates so that they can deliver familiarity. They want to be seen as familiar, they want to be remembered, so when they are seen in the streets it would be easier for somebody to go and say “Hey, I know you! You’re that agent with the ABC company or You’re that agent with XYZ company”.

And there are so many real estate agents that have built their personal brand and have won businesses on the fact that people want them to sell their house to, buy from them or engage in an auction or negotiation with them. The trend now is that people are now are looking into the personality of those individual agents before purchasing a home.

Realtors can greatly benefit from using social media when building their brand. To help you build your personal brand as a realtor, here are the 3 social media tools that I believe agents should be active in.

LinkedIn

Is a tool that you can use from a professional standpoint. This platform allows you to network with business owners, with individuals within a particular geography that you are working within. It gives you an advantage to position yourself professionally and in regards to your professional content about the real estate industry. Your knowledge and expertise showcased in this platform can help you build or grow your influence.

Facebook

Facebook is going to give you that broader demographic, that broader population, it allows you to be hyper local. So, hyper local means you got a geography that your targeting. It allows you to be really well positioned within that geography that you’re targeting when you’re buying or selling houses.

So, if you’re fostering the sale of houses and linking it with potential buyers or conversely looking for listings to be able to sell those houses, Facebook is a very good way of introducing yourself within the community.

Instagram

Instagram works similarly with Facebook except that it’s focused on capturing visual and Instagram stories. Instagram has hashtags and from a hashtag’s perspective, it can give you a lot of reach. It allows you to showcase some of your properties. It allows you to talk or build your personality in the Instagram stories. People who are locally based can follow you, can find you, they can see your attitude and personality, and get a good understanding of who you are as an individual.

These social media tools would be the best tools to use to help grow your personal brand and your influence within your local area.

And then nothing beats the good old fashioned tactical marketing — getting face to face with individuals, joining community events, being involved in your community and genuinely just wanting to immerse yourself in what you do and what happens around your community. Because that’s what’s going to give you that respect.

It’s going to give you that recognition and its definitely going to help activate your audience. You may be able to build that audience of people who they may not be willing to sell their house now but in 2,3,4 or 5 years, they certainly can become your potential buyers. And when that happens, you would like them to be able to remember you as the one that they would consult when it comes to buying a house.

The beauty about the social media tools is it allows you to communicate and set yourself as an authority in a particular niche and be able to do it at scale in a really efficient way as it happens.

Being at the auction, being at the open home, being at the first visitation, whatever it might be – these are the moments that you can capture and use as a tool to build your brand. Capturing these in your phone is such an easy tool to get that action as it happens– real time. It’s great knowing that you can continually build your personal brand and your influence while sharing your expertise and knowledge of your market and your community with your audience. Social Media tools helps create a win-win situation for both realtors and buyers.

With most people relying on the internet to find local businesses nowadays, business has the power to reach millions of potential customers. Businesses are starting to realize that they need to start activating multiple platforms to reach their target audience and stay competitive.

To establish an online presence, using one or two platforms is what I typically recommend for small business owners. For growing businesses that wants to activate different target audiences, business or channels, I’d recommend using social media management tools to manage different social media platforms for different businesses.

Prior establishing your presence online and reaching customers worldwide, we’ve listed the benefits and limitations of social media management tools to help you make an informed decision.

Benefits

It allows you to consolidate the management of one business into one place as opposed to having to go to the individual channels. For instance, there are many reasons why a company would have multiple social pages and imagine how hard it would be when you have to login and logout of each individual profile and network to check all the messages. Having been able to manage all accounts and profiles in one spot saves you the time and effort needed to constantly juggle accounts

It typically also offers services that you can’t see in another channel offers. As an example, Facebook, LinkedIn and other channels allows scheduling while Instagram doesn’t. Instagram still requires an approval from a phone to post.

Limitations

Using social media management platforms has its drawbacks as well. Like Hootsuite, it’s also being known to cause effectively penalties by the algorithm of the social media platform that it’s being posted to. So, there’s has been times where we’ve seen the reach of the post that’s came from a social media management tool being posted on Facebook has not received the same amount of reach as opposed to the post that’s been placed organically on Facebook. Another instance would be posts sent via Facebook scheduler which is intended to go live at an optimum time coming from the scheduler may not always perform as well as compared to something being posted live, real time, as it happens.

When using social media platforms, there will be varying softwares that one would use. These softwares has the tendency to have bugs or to have issues that can cause scheduling issues, image issues, not rendering the image the way that you want it to, not picking up on links in the same way other social media platform might. So, there’s still like little nuisances about it which can impact the performance of the social media management tool.

As an agency, we use social media platforms because we have to juggle different accounts since we have multiple clients and it’s a helpful tool for us.

So, we have a mixed of strategies where we use these social media platforms but we ensure that we select how these platforms can add value to the posts and content that we manage.

For instance, we’ll schedule some things in Facebook then we will use a third-party tool, a software, to manage our LinkedIn and Instagram. Then, we post live to Instagram, and we approve that live from our phones as it happens. It’s the same thing that we do when scheduling posts in twitter.

If you’re a franchise business and you have a hundred outlets around the country and you need to be responsible at a national level for posting across all of them, then, a tool like a Hootsuite, is very valuable in having multiple pages, and being able to create one post that’s gets posted across multiple pages helps you save tons of effort and time.

Meanwhile, if you’re a business startup that is just posting across multiple platforms such as LinkedIn, twitter, Instagram, Facebook as an example then it may be overkill and may not be necessary to have a social media management platform. I’d suggest to better spend the energy and time in making sure that your content is more relevant to the individual platforms and the audiences that are on those platforms rather than just trying to make it more convenient to get that content out there.

Ultimately, for businesses that are looking into using these social media platforms, whether you are a small startup or a large corporation, I’d suggest to look at the pricing, the features and how well these platforms can help scale your business and reach your target audience.

In my next blog I aim to answer a question that came in from a local business owner, Laura, who wants to know what type of content she should be posting to enhance engagement from her target audience.

“I’ve read everywhere that I should publish content that is valuable for my target audience. But it seems that what is valuable to my target audience is not really connected with services offered by my company. So, what should I publish on the company’s page?” – Says Laura, a start-up business owner.

How do I get noticed on social media? It’s a question I often get asked by my family, friends, potential clients or even long-term clients.

For someone so focused on all being dangerously digital, I love this question because it’s broad enough for me to go down to so many different avenues, but I will to focus on a couple of things for this blog.

So, there’s a couple of ways of getting noticed and it depends on the platform that you’re using.

Let me show you how to get noticed on the three most prolific channels.

LinkedIn

If you are a professional looking to discover, connect and nurture relationships with people that matter. You can tap into your professional potential in LinkedIn. Here’s how to get noticed in this platform.

First – Build your connection base

Go back to the people that you’ve met. Search people that you’ve dealt with in the past. Look for people that you’ve networked with over time. Find the people whom you believe you could create a relationship with, then connect with them.

Second – Offer value

The first step sounds simple and exciting right? A word of caution, before you go any further –Remember when you’re connecting with them, offer some value. You need to have a reason why you’re connecting with them, so that they don’t think that you’re just trying to gain access to their network. The amount of traffic that LinkedIn is getting and the viewership is working really well. Use that as a way to offer value. Primarily, find written articles and videos especially now that videos work really well on LinkedIn.

Third – Engage

Look and follow the type of people that you associate with or your business would associate with. Find the influencers in your industry and then engage with their content. Some tips on how to engage would be, writing some responses, seeing what other people have to say, maybe challenging what they have to say or agreeing with what they have to say.

LinkedIn is a great platform for some very robust and intellectual conversations so it’s a good platform for being able to voice your thoughts and opinions and knowledge in a very professional way without necessarily sounding unproductive or attacking someone. These attacks usually tend to happen on other social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, because it’s a little more casual but not on LinkedIn.

Instagram

If you’re someone looking to capture and share the world’s moments, then Instagram is for you.

Here’s how to get noticed in this platform.

First – Tag your location

When posting your Instagram stories, make sure to tag your locations. Stories with tagged locations tends to have higher engagement than stories that do not have tagged locations.

Second – Use #Hashtags

Adding hashtags to your Instagram stories make it easier for people to find, follow, and contribute to your stories or conversations. It’s important that the hashtags that you’ll use are relevant.

You can take these a step further. You can both do location tagging and hashtag tagging in your Instagram stories.

So, for instance, I was in Byron Bay recently on business, working out there for a week with my business partners, and I was fairly regularly tagging a lot of my content in Byron Bay, so I was doing the location-based tagging but then I was also doing hashtags relevant to what we were doing.

At one point in time, we were coding and hash tagging the word coding got us a huge amount of traffic. A lot of people who we wouldn’t have normally been able to reach, who may be checking or following that hashtag, checked it out.

Facebook

The reality now is that it’s really tough now if you’re trying to build Facebook organically. It’s a pay to play environment, which means if you want your content to be seen and to reach a broad number of people, you need to pay for that.

Here’s how to get noticed in this platform.

First – Invest

It doesn’t have to be a huge amount of money; conservative levels of investment are fine to make sure that the right people are seeing your content

Second – Engage

Find the type of people that you want to follow. Look for the businesses that are doing well and engage with their content. What tends to happen is they see you, you’ve reached out to them, maybe offered some value, offered some good discussion, there’s a greater chance that they are going to look at your profile, look at your business page and follow you as well.

Third – Build a Facebook group

Create your own channel and your own audience for Facebook.

When you own the group and you build that group organically over time, it gives you direct access to your audience and the content that you produce will always be seen by your audience. Your content will always pop up in their notifications. If they’re in a group, group notifications will always register on individual’s notifications, so it’s a really great way of getting a very tight knit and very focused audience all in one place.

As a bonus, the same principle applies to Twitter as well. Tweeting people back and just engaging is a great way to get noticed.

Are you wondering if social media is the right platform for your business to generate software sales?

As a business owner, if you think that social media is the best channel or the first step where you could increase your database and activate your customers, I am here to challenge that and I will show you why. It is something that you can do a bit later but certainly not the first and only channel.

I think that’s where a lot of businesses go wrong in the software space. The think about the software, they come up with this amazing idea, yet they aren’t talking to or physically selling or having those face-to-face discussions with the market.

They think that by creating a software, marketing it on social media that they’re just going to get this mass influx of people and unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of businesses fail in that context, where there’s no connection with the community. Or they all like the idea but they haven’t been taken on the journey of using the software, how that software would apply to them and then getting them regularly using it.

When generating sales using business software, what I have found is that you can use social media such as LinkedIn as a powerful tool to help add value to your business. It’s a tool that can help you to tell your story, paint a picture or narrative how your business or company runs. This can help you inform your audience on the challenges and pain points that your business has as well as the consumers experience. This platform would also allow you to introduce to the market how your business software have been designed to help solve the challenges of their business.

To give more context on the strategy, I will share with you my experience with one of the businesses that I’m a co-founder of, it’s called MUVAL.

Focus on your database

The thing that I would suggest in particular with business software is, and the one thing that you do want to really focus in on, is that database.

So, depending on what scale or how you want to sell that software, and what the cost is, who the target audience is, this could really vary.

You might need to ask yourself a few questions to help you. You might want to think through who exactly it is that would be using your software on a daily basis, and then ask them the question of where their attention is or what their pain points are. Find out what do they do, how do they act, what time do they spend on various platforms? What would compel them to use this software? There is so much software, there’s an app for everything out there these days, what would make your one different? What’s the value? Why would they part with money?

You need to ask yourself those questions first, before you try and go mass market or try and get them on social.

Market your software

For MUVAL, we’ve created a software component. It a basic CRM and sales tool to help removal companies manage their loads, upload their trips, schedule their jobs, quote their jobs and then deliver those jobs.

It’s got an app that’s attached to it, which allows them to track their trucks travelling all around Australia. The app was designed to help them know where these trucks are at any given time. It even has the ability to notify the customer to let them know that the trucks are on their way.

Prior the launch, removal companies are just using mass-produced softwares that’s out there or they use a lot of primitive systems such as pen and paper, log books and even maybe Excel spreadsheets or Word documents. They don’t have an option or a software that could cater to the day to day demands of the trucking business. Now they have this really cool piece of software, that was designed to help provide convenience for both companies and customers. It allowed them to have a process that is easier to manage for both parties.

During the process, what we’ve found out is that the best way to effectively sell that software has revolved around a few different areas. First, we went straight to businesses to have a face to face conversation. We did our research. We called the people. We dig deeper on the pain points that these businesses are facing. Then we show them our piece of software – the GREAT app, the one that could help answer all their questions. We asked them if it is something that can solve their problems? Do they think that it is relevant and is it something that could provide value to them?

So that was the first step. By doing that, it enabled us to validate the software opportunity. It is a laborious process. Yes, it was manual. But that is what you need to do if you want to offer something of value to the market. But as part of that process, what it also meant was, we are slowly building our database.

Now that we have our database, understood the pain points of these businesses and established relationships, we are now able to follow up with them. We sent a series of emails once the software was ready.

Since we were able to build that relationship, when we send the emails, it was as simple as “Hey, we’d love you to check it out. You know, you gave us your time to give us that feedback, how would you like to test it? How would you like to have a go at playing with the software? It’s free of charge. We just want you to tell us where it could be improved, or any faults, or any bugs, or any challenges or issues you’ve faced with it. We really want to make it good for the industry.”

That’s how simple yet complex it is. It was a manual process. So that’s what we did. So, we built it.

Up to this day, we hadn’t even touched the social media. We haven’t really activated social media yet for the removal side of things because these guys, they’re busy running trucks, they’re busy running their businesses.

They’re not sitting there enjoying the consumption of content, per se. They are literally working from load to load to load, taking calls, booking trips, understanding where their trucks are going, talking to their fleets, talking to the customers. So, it’s quite involved.

So, the value in the whole process was in having the one-to-one conversations. It was very tactical to be able to build that database, build those email addresses, be able to get them to test the product, roll it out and using email marketing to help have that conversation.

Finally, we used Google. We used pay-per-click. It was effective for those that are pro-actively searching or looking for a solution to run their business. Pay per click advertising allowed us to build interest and drive leads.

Little did we know that through our pay per click advertising, our removalers companies were signing up to the platform as well. So, yes, social media might be something that we still need to do but it could be done a little bit later. Because, aside from social media, the real value is in that one-to-one conversations and the relationship that was built during that process because it was in that process that the database was built.

For the removalers companies, the business-based software sales were very much a strategic marketing process that started from the face-to-face through to the digital activation and pay-per-click advertising.

So maybe that gives you a bit of insight into how you can take that to market.

Use Social Media wisely

When you’ve established a customer base that is where social does comes in handy. Your customer base can start from as little as five or twenty people that are committed in testing and using the software, free of charge. Once your customer base starts giving you feedback that’s actually the point in time where starting a Facebook group and an online community for the users of your software then becomes valuable.

What you can do next is control that community and give them value by giving them information that could be helpful to them while using your software. You can simply post in your Facebook group page and say “hey, do you know this hack?” “Have you used this function?” “Did you know the software can do this?” “Look, now it integrates with this.”

These simple things add value to your customers and increase engagement. It’s a great way of keeping those people who have been loyal to your software and your product, engaged in a way that drives value to them. If your software’s fairly technical or has a lot of variables into it, having a Facebook Page would help foster a community to talk together about challenges that they face in using the software. The discussion could also be about solving the problems. It can also allow sharing of best practices on how they have used the software in a really productive way for their businesses.

Ultimately, the general strategy to generate software sales is to get super tactical, get front line, ring the people, talk to them face-to-face. Don’t be afraid to have those conversations, do it at scale, communicate with them regularly. Yes, use advertising to build your database but the database is the key for software sales.

I recently got asked what the mindset of a successful entrepreneur is.

I feel humbled to have been asked this question, however, whilst I do have an element of success and I have a number of businesses that are performing quite well, for me, this is just the beginning. And perhaps a lot of the successful entreprenures of this world feel the same, they may not see themselves as being overly successful either, in that it’s a journey, not a destination.

But going back to the question about the mindset of the successful entrepreneur, I can only really share what my mindset is, which is what I know, and I’m sure every entrepreneur has a different view on what makes up the mindset of a successful entrepreneur. But I think, first and foremost, for me, it’s tenacity. It’s just being relentless in your approach to anything that you’re doing.

So, I am a big believer in it being an ‘all or nothing’ exercise. I don’t think you can be half in and half-hearted on any one thing in particular. What motivates me is just knowing that I’m making a commitment to something, just like a marriage, just like being in a sports team, just like being part of a gym, or being on a board of directors. You make a commitment to be part of something, and that commitment is what drives your mindset to stay focused on that end goal, whatever that may be.

I think a component of an entrepreneur’s mindset is drawn from the hunger and the need or the willingness to achieve, which may come from a background of hardship, as it does with me. I draw upon the fact that my dad migrated from Malta to Canada and couldn’t speak a word of English and struggled with his reading and writing. And he still made something of himself and he was still able to work. And that’s because he let his work do the talking, because he was an amazing craftsman. And my mother, quite well educated, also migrated from Malta to Canada and although educated she chose to be a stay-at-home mum and take care of the family. So, it is these sacrifices that I draw upon to motivate me to succeed. Knowing that whatever the circumstances, my parents were able to make it work and put food on our table and send us to a private school.

Another aspect of my life that I draw upon is the fact that I grew up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, in a single income family. Being that we never had much money left over after food and bills, I was 14 when I decided that if I wanted things for myself I would have to work for them myself as my parents were doing everything they could. I decided from a very young age that I was hungry for success and I wanted to be able to buy the things I wanted for me and not rely upon anyone else to get it for me. And so I constantly draw on that feeling that I had from a very young age and this is what motivates me to succeed.

I think where a lot of people go wrong is by having a sense of entitlement. Whether that be an entitlement that their parents support them, or an entitlement to a pay rise a work, I think if you remove that sense of entitlement, that is the key to an entrepreneurs mindset. Because once you stop feeling entitled, you just work for it. You work for what you want, rather than waiting for it to come to you.

Lastly, and most importantly, is the willingness to fail. Being able to understand that you may fail dismally and being strong enough to accept it is key. And that’s something that again I am very comfortable with, because if you come from nothing you understand that you’ve got effectively nothing to lose. And that’s not to say that you shouldnt calculate your risks, but rather, you need to back yourself, back your knowledge, skill set and network. And understand that there are lessons to be learned in failing.

So, for me, I think they are the three things that contribute to the entrepreneur’s mindset and they’re the things that resonate and work with me. Hopefully, that, it’ll inspire you or entice you to figure what it is that motivates and drives you to success.

If you’re interested in learning more and you feel that you need a simplified guide to business marketing strategies feel free to grab a copy of my book or reach out to me on Facebook or LinkedIn. I’ll be more than happy to help if you have any questions or uncertainties in regards to your business or marketing strategy.

I would like to start this blog by noting that each of the social media platforms available all have their own features and benefits, each with the attention of a different type of demographic. Obviously, the dominating platforms are Facebook and Instagram, with Snapchat on the rise, and from a professional perspective, LinkedIn. But the three I believe your business or personal profile should focus on are Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. And within these different channels or platforms, I want to highlight the different features that you should be taking advantage of in 2018.

Are you using brand ambassadors to build your brand and online presence?

Back in my corporate days, finding somebody famous or who had attention of an audience, to become your ambassador was quite an expensive exercise, and it still can be depending on who it is. But what I love about ambassadors and social media in particular is that now it can be a relatively cost effective strategy to implement for your brand. I recently wrote a blog about how to use micro influencers on social media, which I recommend reading if you have questioned using a brand ambassador, as the concept is relatively the same.